Frances Osborne. (2009). The Bolter. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Frances Osborne. 2009. The Bolter. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Frances Osborne, The Bolter. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.

Frances Osborne. The Bolter. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: Africa
2. • value: Biography
3. • value: African history
4. • value: WWI
5. • value: British
6. • value: african
7. • value: autobiographies
8. • value: Virago
9. • value: European History
10. • value: Greta Garbo
11. • value: marriage
12. • value: World History
13. • value: Affairs
14. • value: Autobiography
15. • value: women
16. • value: 20th Century
17. • value: high society
18. • value: Divorce
19. • value: feminism
20. • value: 1930s
21. • value: biographies
22. • value: 1920s
23. • value: Kenya
24. • value: adultery
25. • value: History
26. • value: history of africa
27. • value: scandal
28. • value: Happy valley
29. • value: history books
30. • value: history of england
31. • value: women in history
32. • value: historical books
33. • value: nancy mitford
34. • value: sex parties
35. • value: gifts for history buffs
36. • value: biographies of famous people
37. • value: bolter
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Osborne, Frances
   • bioText: Frances Osborne was born in London and studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. She is the author of Lilla’s Feast. Her articles have appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, the Daily Mail, and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband, a Member of Parliament, and their two children.
   • name: Frances Osborne

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2009-06-02T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Bolter

fullDescription

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
An O, The Oprah Magazine #1 Terrific Read
In an age of bolters—women who broke the rules and fled their marriages—Idina Sackville was the most celebrated of them all. Her relentless affairs, wild sex parties, and brazen flaunting of convention shocked high society and inspired countless writers and artists, from Nancy Mitford to Greta Garbo. But Idina’s compelling charm masked the pain of betrayal and heartbreak.
 
Now Frances Osborne explores the life of Idina, her enigmatic great-grandmother, using letters, diaries, and family legend, following her from Edwardian London to the hills of Kenya, where she reigned over the scandalous antics of the “Happy Valley Set.” Dazzlingly chic yet warmly intimate, The Bolter is a fascinating look at a woman whose energy still burns bright almost a century later.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content:

     "Engrossing and beautifully written. . . . [An] affecting story."

2. • premium: False
   • source: People
   • content: "Intoxicating."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Plain Dealer
   • content: "If notorious relatives make for the best dinner-party anecdotes, then Frances Osborne should be able to dine out for decades.... Enthralling."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "Idina Sackville . . . could have stepped out of an Evelyn Waugh satire about the bright young things who partied away their days in the '20s and '30s, and later crashed and burned. . . . Frances Osborne . . . conjure[s] a vanished world with novelistic detail and flair."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "An engaging book, drawing a revealing portrait of a remarkable woman and adding humanity to her 'scandalous' life. . . . Ms. Osborne has succeeded in her stated aim, to write a book that 'has in a way brought Idina back to life.' And what a life it was."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Newsday
   • content: "Vibrant. . . . Osborne connects vast expanses of the dots that formed Idina's reality: the gender inequalities in Edwardian England, the economic imperatives of colonialism, the mores of upper-class adultery, the differences between Idina's aristocratic father . . . and her merely wealthy mother."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Providence Journal
   • content: "Intelligent, moving, and packed with exquisite detail."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "[Idina Sackville's] life story, speckled with the names of the rich and famous, is a miniature history lesson, bringing into sharp focus both world wars, the Jazz Age, and the colonization of Kenya. . . . Sackville's passion lights up the page."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "[A] rumbustious and harrowing biography that takes us from London to Newport to Kenya. . . . A feast for the Anglophile."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The Daily Beast
    • content: "Brilliant and utterly divine. . . . A breath of fresh air from a vanished world."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Good Housekeeping
    • content: "The Bolter is a biographical treat."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
    • content: "Fascinating. . . . Paint[s] an interesting picture of Edwardian England, its social mores and rigors giving way to the wildness of pre-depression Europe."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Financial Times
    • content: "An engaging, definitive final look back at those naughty people who, between the wars, took their bad behavior off to Kenya and whose upper-class delinquency became gilded with unjustified glamour."
14. • premium: False
    • source: The Columbus Dispatch
    • content: "A sympathetic but evenhanded portrait of a woman driven by needs and desires even she didn't understand."
15. • premium: False
    • source: The Observer (London)
    • content: "Truly interesting. Osborne paints an enthralling portrait of upper class English life just before, during and immediately after the Great War. Frivolous, rich, sexy [and] achingly fashionable."
16. • premium: False
    • source: NPR
    • content: "Even today Lady Idina Sackville could get tongues wagging. . . . A lively portrait of the UK-born troublemaker, a woman who took countless lovers, raised hell in England and Africa, inspired novels by Nancy Mitford and carried around a dog she named Satan. . . . Through [Idina's] story, we not only get a sexy and difficult-to-put-down read, we also get a good look at the shadow side of this prim and proper era and the real women who defied convention to live in it."--Jessa Crispin, "Books We Like,"
17. • premium: False
    • source: The Sunday Telegraph (London)
    • content: "A racy romp underpinned by some impressive research."
18. • premium: False
    • source: Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
    • content: "Passionate and headstrong, Lady Idina was determined to be free even if the cost was scandal and ruin. Frances Osborne has brilliantly captured not only one woman's life but an entire lost society."
19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 27, 2009
      Osborne's lively narrative brings Lady Idina Sackville (an inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character the Bolter) boldly to life, with a black lapdog named Satan at her side and a cigarette in her hand. Osborne (Lilla's Feast
      ) portrays a desperately lonely woman who shocked Edwardian high society with relentless affairs and drug-fueled orgies. Idina's story unfolds in an intimate tone thanks to the author, her great-granddaughter, who only accidentally discovered the kinship in her youth with the media serialization of James Fox's White Mischief
      . Osborne makes generous use of sources and private family photos to add immediacy and depth to the portrait of a woman most often remembered as an amoral five-time divorcée: the author shows her hidden kindnesses at her carefully preserved Kenyan cattle ranch—a refuge from the later destructive Kenyan massacres. Still, Osborne unflinchingly exposes Idina's flaws—along with those of everyone else in the politely adulterous high society—while ably couching them in the context of the tumultuous times in which Idina resolved to find happiness in all the wrong places. The text, most lyrical when describing the landscapes around Idina's African residences, proves that an adventurous spirit continues to run in this fascinating family. 66 photos,

20. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2009
      Sordid tales of aspiration and debauchery among the minor aristocracy of Britain.
      
      Osborne (Lilla's Feast: A Story of Food, Love, and War in the Orient, 2004) doesn't mean to malign her great-grandmother, the perpetrator of much bad behavior and the protagonist of this book. Indeed, by her account Idina Sackville earns points for not being a"husband stealer" and for being what one friend called"preposterously—and secretly—kind." Yet Idina, daughter of the philandering Earl De La Warr, took up with odd company early on. Her parents were unintended role models. Idina's mother, writes Osborne, married the earl to gain a title, and the earl, known as"Naughty Gilbert," married Idina's mother for her money. Eventually, Idina married rich, too—one of the richest men in Britain, in fact,"rich enough for his social ambitions to withstand marrying a girl from a scandalous family." She spent months designing a Xanadu featuring a"rabbit warren of dozens of nursery bedrooms and servants' rooms," but, alas, never got to see the pleasure dome completed, since the marriage turned out to be loveless and lost. Idina moved on, as she would four more times, ending up in British East Africa, where she made a hearty game of spouse-swapping and wound up figuring in stories that, among other things, would yield the aptly titled 1987 film White Mischief, as well as Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love (1945) and other period books—to say nothing of plenty of tabloid tales. Osborne, who writes pleasantly and carefully, hints that Idina was a pioneering feminist, but this portrait makes her appear to be self-absorbed and sad, living out a boozy, wandering and generally feckless life.
      
      Of interest to royal-watchers and certain strains of anglophiles, perhaps, but a sansculotte may wonder what the point is.

      (COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

21. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 15, 2009
      Lady Idina Sackville must be among the last of the titled and scandalous Brits of the post-World War I era whose lives have not yet been recorded in biography. Osborne, her great-granddaughter, has filled that small gap with this gossipy story, which takes its name from a sad minor character that novelist Nancy Mitford is said to have modeled on Idina in "The Pursuit of Love". The Mitford connection is pretty much it for a claim to fame. In 1919 Idina deserted a fabulously wealthy husband and two toddlers to marry a lover and buy a farm in her beloved Kenya, where she turned up again (and usually built another house) with each of her subsequent three husbands. Osborne recounts with gusto the byzantine sexploits of Idina, her husbands, and their many houseguests. She claims that Idina also served as the model for the vamp heroine of Michael Arlen's sensational 1920s best seller "The Green Hat". VERDICT This is not a work of great depth; typical of the haphazard construction of the book, Osborne forgets to tell us if either Mitford or Arlen actually knew Idina. Still, those who enjoy stories (fiction or nonfiction) of the past's oversexed and idle rich (and there are lots of these readers) will love this book.Stewart Desmond, New York City

      Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

22. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 1, 2009
      The story of Idina Sackvilles life reads like an elaborately embroidered work of fiction. What makes this biography so compulsively readable, however, is the fact that it is all shockingly true. Osborne has painstakingly reconstructed the scandalous adventures of her great-grandmother, taking the reader along for the wild ride. As an Edwardian belle, one of the brightest of the Lost Generations Bright Young Things, and a British expatriate living in the thick of colonial Kenyas notorious Happy Valley Set, Idina continually defied conventional expectations, marrying and divorcing five times, often leaving husbands, lovers, and children in her wake. Though there isnt much to admire about Sackvilles serial infidelity and careless choices, this niche biography is enhanced by the novelistic scope and passion of a life lived against a cinematic-style backdrop.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

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A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
An O, The Oprah Magazine #1 Terrific Read
In an age of bolters—women who broke the rules and fled their marriages—Idina Sackville was the most celebrated of them all. Her relentless affairs, wild sex parties, and brazen flaunting of convention shocked high society and inspired countless writers and artists, from Nancy Mitford to Greta Garbo. But Idina’s compelling charm masked the pain of betrayal and heartbreak.
 
Now Frances Osborne explores the life of Idina, her enigmatic great-grandmother, using letters, diaries, and family legend, following her from Edwardian London to the hills of Kenya, where she reigned over the scandalous antics of the “Happy Valley Set.” Dazzlingly chic yet warmly intimate, The Bolter is a fascinating look at a woman whose energy still burns bright almost a century later.

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